Automating the URL Inspection API: Screaming Frog's guide to bulk index checks

The URL Inspection tool in Search Console tells you everything about one URL and nothing about a thousand. Google's API behind it lets you ask the same question at scale, but wiring up authentication and working within a 2,000-URL-per-property-per-day quota is fiddly enough that most people give up before finishing. This tutorial from Screaming Frog is the guide that gets you through it, connecting the SEO Spider to the API so a crawl reports live indexing status, canonical resolution and coverage verdicts against real Google data rather than assumptions.

Why it made the cut

When large-scale index monitoring comes up in practitioner conversation, this is the guide that actually gets linked, not a vague "check Search Console" gesture. It comes from the most trusted name in technical SEO crawling software, it is kept current with the tool's own updates, and it treats the quota limitation honestly instead of glossing over it, telling you how to plan a crawl around 2,000 checks a day rather than promising something the API cannot deliver.

How to run it

1. Create a Google Cloud project and enable the Search Console API, following the credentials setup the tutorial walks through.
2. In Screaming Frog, connect the API via the Search Console configuration, authorising against the property you want to check.
3. Run a crawl with URL Inspection enabled; each URL checked counts against the daily quota, so prioritise the URLs that matter most on a large site.
4. Read the indexing verdict, canonical, and coverage state columns alongside your normal crawl data.

Worth knowing

The 2,000 URLs per day per property quota is Google's hard limit, not Screaming Frog's, so a large site needs a deliberate sampling or rotation plan rather than one full-site pass. This is a setup tutorial, not a monitoring product: scheduling repeat checks and tracking change over time is left to you.